Category Archives: Argument

NEW ESSAY: Why The ‘National-Interest’ Standard Is ‘Fake & Gay’ & Solidarity With Palestine Is Libertarian

Argument, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism, Logic, Middle East, Natural Law, Neoconservatism, Palestinians, Political Philosophy, Reason, The West, War

NEW ESSAY IS “Why The ‘National-Interest’ Standard Feels ‘Fake & Gay’ & Solidarity With Palestine Is Libertarian.” It appeared on The Unz Review, where it was one of two featured articles to lead the page, and on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.

Now on ILANAMERCER.COM.

Excerpt: 

Stateside, people speak of genocide as though it were an item of foreign-policy, albeit—small mercies—an unwelcome foreign policy event.

Absurd, of course!

Whether such crass utilitarians like it or not, the Anglo-Israeli-American genocide in Palestine is a moral matter, not to be subsumed within the confines of foreign policy, but transcending it.

“Genocide for Israel” is Trump’s de facto Middle East foreign policy. Enmeshed, the American and Israeli cabal, two self-appointed world powers, are presently and shamelessly still engaged in genocide. Israel acts to “disappear” the Palestinians as individuals, as a people and as a polity. Trump, who respects Israel’s wishes to the letter, appoints people who do the same. He pursues and imposes policies that dovetail with what Israel demands.

Israeli-American devilry has entailed the decimation of Palestinian habitat, the salting of their earth for decades to come; the despoiling and theft of their rightfully owned resources, the elimination of their historical artifacts and records; of thousands of their bloodlines. Gone are Gaza’s institutions of law, of learning of healing; their churches, their mosques, their leadership.

All ongoing. We are 790 days into Israel’s relentless bloodletting.

Trump, corporate media and the political ring leaders sashaying up and down both aisles may call the “new” dispensation under which Palestinians live a “ceasefire.” In point of fact, the so-called ceasefire is just Trump’s “engineered new normal: a slow-paced genocide.” For Israel.

The future of Gaza, Trump has made clear, would “be pretty much up to Israel.” When Israel declared its intention to take over Gaza, Donlad Trump had shrugged and egged them on. “Ramp it up,” he whooped. Having long since slipped between the sheets with soulmate Bibi Netanyahu, Trump gave the Israeli prime minister the go-ahead to “fight and finish the job.”

Under Gaza’s weeping winter skies, massacres continue. Drones, killer quadcopters and other Israeli shelling implements come scudding at Gaza from the north all the time. The “destruction of remaining homes, property and land, and the prevention of the entry of food, humanitarian aid and basic infrastructure materials” had never ceased, only let-up slightly. Genocide hums along now at the rate of more than eight human beings murdered a day, and at more than 20 injured, also each day, attest the Euro-Med’s human-rights monitors, on the ground.

By no unfortunate coincidence, Trump had normalized this mindset during his first administration. I was hardly being a crusty cynic when, in a January 3, 2018 column, “How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism,” I foresaw the vanquishing of Venezuela:

Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump’s foreign policy.

A couple of months back, Bloomberg’s Eli Lake let it be known that he was in neoconservative nirvana: ‘… for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. ‘The United States has taken important steps to hold the regime accountable,’ Trump said. ‘We are prepared to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its path to impose authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.’

‘For a moment,” swooned Lake, ‘I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard editorial meeting.’ (“How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism,” Ilana Mercer, January 3, 2018)

“Onward to Venezuela!” I wearily wrote. It was not a mysterious sense of foreboding. I was just following facts.

Then, I watched the lies with fascination. Now, I know all the tricks. Of course I did not vote for the man in 2024. And, of course Trump was bound to normalize genocide for Israel, albeit at a slower pace. 

Another of Trump’s hombres is Florida Representative Randy Fine. No sooner did the “Hebrew Hammer,” as he fondly calls himself, advise the Palestinian collective to “starve away”—than Trump rushed to pose by Fine’s side. The pair of them, two mountains of flesh as soft as sin, giving themselves over with passionate intensity to criminal complicity. That was in July of 2025. Come October of 2025, Trump endorsed Fine’s  candidacy.

Having gotten their hostages back, the inviolable Israelis, for their part, have settled into a different rhythm of genocide. The only thing that has come to an end in Israel are mass hostage protests. Since the Israeli-dictated “ceasefire” took effect on 10 October, upwards of 352 Palestinians have been murdered by Israel and over  900 injured. “Gaza is a living necropolis,” reports the Glia organization, also on the ground in Gaza.

Having kept up its standards, the majority of the casualties inflicted by the “most moral army in the world” are women, children and the elderly. You might look at these two diminutive brothers, small for their ages (for obvious reasons), and think kids. IDF terrorists, with far greater acuity than you, were able to discern “two suspects who crossed the yellow line,” and were conducting “suspicious activities on the ground.” …

… The REST. “Why The ‘National-Interest’ Standard Feels ‘Fake & Gay’ & Solidarity With Palestine Is Libertarian” is on The Unz Review and on LewRockwell.com

Now on ILANAMERCER.COM.

HASBARA UPDATES (11/26): ON TOM WOODS TV: GAZA IN RETROSPECT: BLOCK V. MERCER

Argument, Crime, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism, War

ILANA MERCER: Israel, state and civil society, is a degenerate, genocidal entity engaged in an extermination campaign against Palestinian Resistance. Solidarity with this resistance-based society is the ONLY libertarian position.

I was hoping to refute many more Hasbara points. But Walter’s format of presenting a long lecture packed with many Hasbara points did not allow me to puncture his disquisition with counterpoints, so as to address each of his points.

Please post your comments to these two spaces:

  1. The Comments section of this Tom Woods TV debate:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0g2XEGSyDk
  2.  The Unz Review, without which there is no truly diverse, dissident writing, left and right. The comments space to post your thoughts is “On Tom Woods TV: Gaza in Retrospect, Block V. Mercer.”    https://www.unz.com/imercer/on-tom-woods-tv-gaza-in-retrospect-block-v-mercer/
  3. The blog Comment space is open to you, too.
    https://barelyablog.com/on-tom-woods-tv-gaza-in-retrospect-block-v-mercer/#comments

Many thanks,

ilana

UPDATES (11/21) from X:

https://x.com/UncleFlapjacks/status/1991917293572612546

https://x.com/DerekWheeler42/status/1991917079306322137

UPDATE (11/22): Thanks, Pilot Dave on LinkedIn, for taking the time to support.

UPDATES (11/26):   One of the fallacies I was hoping to get to dispute during the Tom Woods TV debate was this myth-history:

“…the departure and expulsion of roughly 900,000 Jews from Arab countries following the founding of the state of Israel.” (Ha’aretz, Nov. 26)

The Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG)has submitted the resolution for a “U.S. Bill [that] Proposes ‘Jewish Refugee Day’ Commemorating Expulsion of Jews From Arab Nations.”

“If approved, Nov. 30 would commemorate the departure and expulsion of roughly 900,000 Jews from Arab countries following the founding of the state of Israel. The holiday was first adopted by Israel in 2014.” (“U.S. Bill Proposes ‘Jewish Refugee Day’ Commemorating Expulsion of Jews From Arab Nations“)

NEW ESSAY (NEWS 10/6): Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: An American Lesson For Pam Bondi, Donald Trump & Netanyahu

America, Anti-Semitism, Argument, Constitution, Donald Trump, Fascism, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, GAZA, Government, Individual Rights, Israel, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Middle East, Natural Law, Palestinians, Racism, The State

Freedom needs no justification. It is an end unto itself. You are deficient in American solidarity if you don’t stand up for non-violent protest and all speech ~ilana 

New essay is “Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: An American Lesson For Pam Bondi, Donald Trump & Netanyahu.” It is featured on The Unz Review (as a leading essay), on The New American, and on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.

You can now read it on IlanaMercer.com.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/10/free-speech-charlie-kirk-american-lesson-pam-bondi-donlad-trump-netanyahu/

Excerpt:

Let us be clear about what freedom of speech à la America truly means:

The words people speak, chant, write and tweet; the beliefs they are known to hold, the flags they fly or burn, the symbolic, non-violent ceremonies and rituals they enact, the insignia, paraphernalia; the goose-stepping, Hitler salutes they muck around with—provided no physical aggression is involved (violence against animals included), all this counts as protected speech, licit in natural law.

So long as oddities and idiosyncrasies, whether performed alone or in groups, thoughts harbored privately or shared in public—so long as no violence accompanies such speech or behavior; so long as your mitts stop at the next man’s face (or at the next mutt’s fury face, Kristi Noem): SPEECH. It’s all speech. It should be free, unfettered and as wild and as wanton as can be.

At their worst, expressions of ostensible antisemitism, Naziism, racisms or other antipathies amount to thought crimes, nothing more, if expressed as a belief system severally or collectively, rather than in palpably violent actions.  Whether your thoughts are spoken, chanted, written or preached; be they impolite or impolitic: they are, at worst, no more than thought crimes.

Thought crimes are nobody’s business in a free society. Thought crimes ought to be ferociously protected by a free people. By logical extension, any accusations of antisemitism, Naziism or other antipathies and racisms, are especially suspect when emitted as a meme from American institutionalized power structures.

One such obscenely wealthy and worthless power structure is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), or Defamation League—a more apt moniker once suggested by Elon Musk, before he joined the ADL in severely censoring some speech on the X platform. The ADL is a meddlesome shakedown operation, in the mold of the Southern Poverty Law Center (“Smear Artists for the Total State,” wrote Tom DiLorenzo). It has taken it upon itself to decide who lives and who dies socially and financially on the basis of the unfortunate individual’s ideas, spoken and written.

In the American tradition, thoughts and words spoken or written that are politically impolite—again, racism; Naziism, antisemitism—retain protected status as speech beyond the adjudication of law-makers, bureaucrats, mediacrats, educrats and technocrats.

Sniffing out racists or anti-Semites is an absolute no-no for any and all self-respecting, libertarian-minded Americans, or any American, for that matter. Like creedal libertarians, Americans don’t, or should not, prosecute thought crimes or persecute thought “criminals.”

Ours should be The Skokie Standard of free speech and thinking (which I articulated in August 2022). What is The Skokie Standard of free speech? In 1978, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took a stand for free speech by defending a neo-Nazi group that wanted to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, where many Holocaust survivors lived. The Skokie Standard of free speech is one that champions unpopular expression, and vigorously defends all marginalized speakers and thinkers, rather than purveying and protecting state and corporate ideology du jour.

…    Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, RIP, got it. On May 2, 2024, Kirk wrote the following: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi doesn’t get it. No wonder even Glenn Greenwald, once a practicing constitutional attorney—and a man of manners and decorum—regularly appends “dumb” and “lacking any grasp of constitutional law” to any mention of Bondi, who said this after Kirk’s murder:

The Justice Department would “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech…

…  Left, Right and libertarian; we can and must, then, join in unapologetically rejecting the very idea of policing, purging, persecuting or prosecuting people for holding and expressing politically unpopular ideas in action or in speech.

THE REST:  “Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: An American Lesson For Pam Bondi, Donald Trump & Netanyahu” is featured on The Unz Review (as a leading essay), on The New American, and on LewRockwell.com

Read it on IlanaMercer.com.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/10/free-speech-charlie-kirk-american-lesson-pam-bondi-donlad-trump-netanyahu/

NEWS UPDATE (10/6):  Jeremy Scahill
“Hamas’s Strategic Gamble” by the dedicated and able Jeremy Scahill: “While President Trump enthusiastically welcomed Hamas’s response to his Gaza plan, the White House and Israel deal in deception.” (Drop Site News)

9/11: New Essay.’Where Are The Men? Military Action Against Israel. NOW!’ + Aug/Sept News Updates

America, Argument, Ethics, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Just War, Middle East, Military, Morality, Natural Law, Politics, War

Where Are The Men? Military Action Against Israel. NOW!” is a new essay now on The Unz Review, home to dissidents from day one.

You can also find the essay now on IlanaMercer.com

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/08/men-military-action-israel-now/

The core ideas of the piece you are about to read were fleshed-out previously (with more details about geopolitical context), in the lengthy, January 2025 essay, “BRICS And Pan-Arabism Revived To Tackle Israel, Militarily.

Excerpt:

…  Libertarians worth their salt will apply to the collective the same moral code applied to the individual. If a lone serial killer and home invader must not be left to continue on his merry spree of murder and theft; neither may a band of killers armed with WMD do the same. If a lone serial killer ought to be hunted down by good men and women, cuffed, incarcerated and tried; so too must a gang engaged in high-tech, AI-assisted mass murder. That is the simple meaning and application of the libertarian axiom of non-aggression in a world in which defense is not privately produced.

Curiously—and considering the centrality of a values-based pretense in U.S. foreign policy, of good-vs-evil—if ever a clear, moral case for American military intervention presented itself; it is on the side of the civilians of Gaza as against the Israelis, who are armed with Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

This must lead to an inescapable conclusion:

Since the United States of America is not a “global force for good,” it remains for the locals to do the job. A large-scale regional military intervention must be mounted post haste, for there is an affirmative, not a passive, obligation to stop Israel. The world, with some heroic exceptions, has so far breached that legal and moral obligation.  …

…As that most American of crime writers, Raimond Chandler, counselled, “It never pays to let the enemy make all the rules.” And Israel is the enemy, the enemy of humanity.

Similar counsel comes from a recently released, elderly, pro-Palestinian resistance fighter, who spent four decades in a French prison. Described in the French press as a “Lebanese leftist militant imprisoned in France since 1984,” Georges Ibrahim Abdallah remains a masculine force at full tilt.

Abdallah arrived in Lebanon on July the 25th. A large gaggle of press and supporters eddied around him. He told them, “If one million Egyptians try to break the siege on Gaza, the genocide would end.”

Abdallah deferred to lionheart Greta Thunberg as an example of courage: The Swedish young woman had sailed forth in international waters intending to reach the riparian territory of the people of Gaza. For wishing to administer kindness—to slake the thirst and assuage the hunger of some Palestinians—and to galvanize on behalf of Gaza; Israeli terrorists kidnapped Freedom Flotilla activists and forced them into their own benighted country.

Piracy on the high seas. What should have been a safe, peaceful voyage was terminated by pirates, perpetrators of genocide. Does Israel now rule the high seas as well?

I might have misunderstood Mr. Abdallah, but by praising a wee girl for her bravery he seemed to be asking, where are the men?

… READ THE COMPLETE ESSAY. “Where Are The Men? Military Action Against Israel. NOW!” is now on The Unz Review and on IlanaMercer.com

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/08/men-military-action-israel-now/

Screen-capture image via Ha’aretz.

September 11:

There is a reason I wrote that, “The Israel-Occupied Levant Must Be Liberated, S.O.S.,” on 10/19/2024.

Awash with evil, when Israel is not imposed famine-starvation in Gaza, assassinating negotiators (Qatar) as well as entire governments, heads of civilian portfolios, across the Middle East (Yemen)—Jewish Israel is willy-nilly murdering over 100 Palestinians each day and wounding many hundreds more, consigning the injured to slow death by sepsis and starvation, without hope for recovery. The Gaza Strip Israel has demolished. Just in case, The Demon State has set about demolishing “around 300 residential units a day in Gaza City, aided by the Israeli army’s explosive-laden robots.” Soldiers the IDF are not. Here’s a news story from an archaic, old-fashioned keeper records: By November 15, 2023, Gaza City, “the largest Palestinian city,” was near complete destruction.

September 9: 

Today, 09.09.2025, the SS IDF bombed its partners to negotiations, in an attempt to assassinate Palestinian representatives, namely Hamas leadership, in Doha. This was done with US knowledge—and, presumably, acquiescence.

You ask why?

The answer:

“At bottom, these Israeli atavists want subjects they can sanction and slaughter into submission, not educated, erudite neighbors; equals with whom to make magic in the region.”—ILANA Mercer, “IRAN: Everything You Need To Know But Were Too Afraid Of The Israel Lobby To Ask,” July 1, 2025

Via Democracy Now!:

“Dr. Mimi Syed is an emergency medicine physician who’s been on two medical missions in Gaza working in hospitals that were under Israeli siege and was just denied reentry into Gaza, mere hours before she was scheduled to travel there for a third medical mission.”

The following phone message was left for her by a starving Ghazzawi medical student, a friend, heartbroken because she would not be seeing her friend, Dr. Syed:

PALESTINIAN MEDICAL STUDENT:

It’s been over a week since the famine began, and honestly, I haven’t felt full even once. I’m constantly hungry all the day, every day. I sleep every day with hunger. I can’t take anymore, Mimi. You know, I just — I feel weak. I feel too weak to move. And I have to still continue my hospital training every single day without eating. …
Hello, my dear Mimi. Ever since I found out that you couldn’t enter Gaza because of the occupation’s refusal, I’ve been very sad. I had hoped that I will see you soon, and I started to feel better from my previous state of depression and sadness, but now I no longer have any hope. Everything feels over. We don’t even want you to come and help us. They are devils, in every sense of the word.
Mimi, I don’t want anything from life except death, because I truly believe I will find peace in it. I just want everyone to pray for me. I was really hoping to see you soon, but in Gaza, things never go the way we want. I wish there another chance to see you, my dear, hug you, but I know I won’t make it. I know. I love you so much, and I’m really sorry.
And another thing, Israel have already started occupying Gaza. I’m so — I’m so sad, and I’m so tired. We’re getting displaced again. Oh my god. I no longer have any hope. I just want to die. I just want to die right now. Oh my god. You know that love you so much, my dear, and it’s such an honor to know you. Love you. Don’t forget to pray for us. Thank you so much for everything.

August 27:  A crime? Intentional? Israel? You don’t say!

The double-tap murder:

https://x.com/gazanotice/status/1959881104569069708

The aftermath—which has happened countless times for the best part of two years.

https://x.com/gazanotice/status/1959918069104435401

With every new, daily, brazen butchery by Israel, the moron media contemplate, as the Guardian imbecile does, that “Israel’s attack on hospital in Gaza may constitute a war crime.” Double-tap strikes—first target Gazans, then target the beautiful souls who invariably come to the aid of your initial victims—such as the latest by the genocidal entity, are what dissident media have documented for the best part of two years. And the Moron Media still persist in calling genocide a war (Glenn Greenwald, in particular, should know better than to use this misnomer). One more thing:  The legacy media’s language: quit the “were killed” usage. “Were murdered” is the correct appellation.

One of the beautiful people murdered yesterday: Maryam.

Via Euromed Monitor, some Church-of-Satan generated headlines since August 18, on left. On Right, Ha’aretz’s “Starvation Is Everywhere: Virtual Tours of Gaza Clinics Expose the Scale of the Horror.”

August 23 UPDATES:

No clue why Seymour Hersh, august journalist, thinks the Israeli obscene and grotesque future “plan” for Gaza, drawn up by members of the Israeli genocidal entity, is a “fantasy.” Is the Genocide a fantasy? Is the acquiescence in genocide of the Biden-Trump administrations a fantasy? Is the West’s complicity a fantasy? Is utter inaction—nay, assistance—a fantasy? Is the world’s creation of “a place of massive impunity” for Israel a fantasy?

Floated by Israel’s religious right was a “formal plan for the future of Gaza titled ‘The Riviera in Gaza—From Vision to Reality'”. It “is a blueprint for a future in Gaza without the Palestinians who now are living and dying there…”

**

15:22 into a “visit” with perfidious Piers Morgan, the equally reprehensible Megyn Kelly disgorges this: “I am reluctant to put too much stock in the images coming out of Gaza, because they are manipulated and they are masters of propaganda. They are fine having their own children starve, just so long as they can put them on camera and show them off to the world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCoiWisIbuo That’s Hamas, and frankly, that’s a lot of Palestinians. So, I’m very skeptical at [sic] taking those images at face value, and saying that it’s Israel’s fault.”

Some, not me, would add “c-nt and a cretin” to “complicit.” Not me.

A couple of weeks later, this actress begins to slightly rehabilitate her image. Poor Megyn is so independent and is being pushed by AIPAC. She and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene chat about their general admiration for Israel, but need to put America First. They conclude: “If we had the money; we’d give it to Israel. But we don’t.”